“3 Key Trends” with Carsten Press

What are “3 Key Trends” shaping the CDMO industry in 2023 and beyond? Vetter’s senior vice president global sales organization and supply chain management, Carsten Press, shares his thoughts with Contract Pharma.

Resilience and adaptability
Amid the current macro challenges within the pharma and biotech sector, industry players are choosing to pivot, shift and adapt their businesses more rapidly than ever before. This is an effort to keep medications on track for delivery to the patients who rely on them. As a result, drug sponsors are looking to their CDMO partners to do the same. Adaptations and evolutions are now becoming more and more important to support customers in navigating these unprecedented challenges. From cost-driving supply chain challenges and new time-to-market expectations, to evolving drug product portfolios, resilience, and adaptability by the biopharma companies and their CDMO partners is becoming top priority for achieving successful outcomes.

Configurability and sustainability
The current biopharma market of consolidated portfolios is giving way to pipelines full of ever-more complex molecules, specialized therapies, and niche indications. These adaptations are, in turn, supporting greater levels of flexibility and customization for biopharma customers and their CDMOs. Flexibility across services and maintenance of consistent and uncompromising level of quality allows service providers to support a range of customer needs. Drug owners receive access to multifunctional and flexible aseptic filling lines, as well as to the evaluation and pursuit of a new range of delivery systems and platforms. They also benefit from new exploration and qualification of an increasing range of packaging options including sustainable materials.

Additionally, as the climate crisis intensifies, industry players including CDMOs are facing particularly high pressure to help their customers achieve even more ambitious sustainability benchmarks. This fact will likely further increase to drive both strategic business-level investments, such as full carbon neutrality across global operations, and a range of project-level innovations like recyclable packaging formats.

Accelerating digitization
The shift to a digitized pharma and biotech industry is now fully underway. The demands of aseptic fill and finish are also part of this global transition—the investment in robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning can have significant impact on what the future of the industry will look like. Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality (VR), and autonomous, collaborative robots are already proving successful in the digitization of our industry. These “cobots” are showing their ability to work in parallel with trained human workers to achieve faster results, allowing employees to focus on activities that demand their engaging, human-centric skills.

With mobile robots such as “HelMo,” for example, CDMOs are finding new ways to standardize and automate routine, tedious tasks such as defrosting drug substances. When this is done successfully, service providers can fill these roles with robot support and save their human talent for activities that require more personable interactions and engagement. While technology is the catalyst for these advancements, the capabilities of humans remain a priority to the overall success of CDMOs in providing the high levels of service expected by customers.